Flat Ontology/Flat Ethics

Returning to the questions of an earlier post, it seems to me that perhaps the central concern with OOO and SR is that flat ontology leads to a flat ethics. Flat ontology is, in many respects, a response to the primacy of correlationism that places humans, language, Dasein, etc., at the ground of being, as that being to which being is given and that somehow structures all of being. These positions are variants of what I call “vertical ontologies”. Vertical ontologies are characterized by treating on type of being as a privileged being within the order of existence, such that all other beings are dependent on that being. In contemporary thought, that being is generally treated as some variant of the human, the social, or language. For a basic account of flat ontology, one can consult some of my previous posts here and here, or chapter 6 of The Democracy of Objects. The basic characteristic of correlationist ontologies is that the treat the lion’s share of agency as issuing from humans. For example, a theorist might endlessly discuss how signifiers structure reality without examining the differences that nonhuman entities contribute to the world. Under this model, things become passive matters awaiting inscriptions, and do no inscribing or contribute no differences of their own. This, I believe, has been the dominant way of thinking over the last forty years, if not the last two hundred years.

Flat ontology rejects this approach, not because it holds that humans don’t contribute differences to the world– that would be absurd –but because it believes this approach is dangerously one-sided and prevents us from thinking both ecologically and from comprehending why societies and power take the form they do (follow the links above for a more detailed discussion of this). In other words, the aim of flat ontology is not to throw out the magnificent findings of the linguistic idealists, semioticians, social constructivists, phenomenologists, etc. It is not to limit, but to broaden. Towards this end, flat ontology asserts that humans are not sovereigns of being, but are among beings. Nonhumans and the material world are not passive stuffs awaiting human inscription, but rather contribute differences of their own. Indeed, a number of these differences are significant contributors to what human beings are at any point in history and the form that social systems take; often moreso than signs and signifiers. Flat ontology once to open a space where these non-signifying differences can be discerned and their inscriptions can be traced. Thus, rather than focusing on the question of what we contribute to the being of beings– though that question remains –flat ontology strives to draw attention the differences that nonhumans contribute. In other words, it decenters obsessive focus on the agency of humans so as to investigate the agency of things. All flat ontology says is that all things equally exist, even if they unequally contribute differences to various assemblages of entities. A plant is no less a being than a person and its being cannot be reduced to how it is signified in a signifying system. In other words, flat ontology rejects the anthropocentrism implicit in most contemporary theory.

read on!

Judging by the discussions I’ve had over the last three or four years, this thesis somehow manages to cause quite a ruckus. As far as I can tell, the worry seems to be that flat ontology entails a flat ethics. In other words, people seem to somehow jump from the proposal that plants are every bit as much beings as humans, and plants contribute important differences of their own that cannot be reduced to significations, social constructions, effects of social power, intentional experience, etc., to the conclusion that all beings are on equal ethical footing. To put it bluntly, the critic of flat ontology seems to worry that flat ontology entails that we should let the shark eat the child. I am not quite sure how this follows, but the worry seems to come up again and again. To put an end to the suspense, no, I don’t think we should let the shark eat the child.

So far– even among the critical animal theorists –I can’t say that I’ve seen a single ethical theory that I would characterize as non-anthropocentric. I’m not even sure what a non-anthropocentric ethical theory would look like. Even in the case of those ethical theories that argue that we should have heightened regard for animals, that we should attend to their suffering, and that we should have regard for the planet– all positions that I advocate –it still seems to me that we are the ones doing the valuing and proposing the norms and that therefore these positions are anthropocentric. Maybe I’m missing something, or maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part, but it seems to me that for an ethical philosophy to be truly flat it would 1) have to begin from how nonhumans value, and 2) evaluate humans from that standpoint. I suppose that there are some ways in which we might do that already as in the case of Temple Grandin exploring the world of cows to develop kinder ways of treating them, or the ways in which we treat our pets, taking into account what we understand of their desires so as to assist them in living a satisfying life and in avoiding cruelty with them. However, given that we don’t simply attend to the conatus of nonhumans, but are also concerned with our own conatus, I don’t see a circumstance arising in which we conclude that the “rights” of bubonic plague bacteria trump our own endeavor to persist in our being. Do people really worry about this.

I think that Eileen Joy, in a comment over at Alex Reid’s Digital Digs, best articulates what the aims of an object-oriented ethics (OOE) might look like.

Responding to one of his recent posts, she writes:For me personally, turning one’s attention to animals, objects, post/humanism and so on is precisely about thickening our capacity to imagine more capacious forms of “living with”; it is precisely about developing more radical forms of welcoming and generosity to others, who include humans as well as trees, rocks, dogs, cornfields, ant colonies, pvc pipes, and sewer drains; it is precisely about amplifying the ability of our brains to pick up more communication signals from more “persons” (who might be a human or a cloud or a cave) whose movements, affects, and thoughts are trying to tell us something about our interconnectedness and co-implicated interdependence with absolutely everything (or perhaps even about a certain implicit alienation between everything in the world, which is nevertheless useful to understand better: take your pick); it is precisely about working toward a more capacious vision of what we mean by “well-being,” when we decide to attend to the well-being of humans and other “persons” (who might be economic markets or the weather or trash or homeless cats) who are always enmeshed with each other in various “vibrant” networks, assemblages, meshes, cascades, systems, whathaveyou. And just for me — likely, just for me– it is also about love, with love defined, not as something that goes in one direction from one person to another person or object (carrying with it various demands and expectations and self-centered desires), but rather, as a type of collective labor that works at creating “fields” for persons and objects to
emerge into view that otherwise would remain hidden (and perhaps also remain abjectified), and which persons and objects could then be allowed the breathing/living room to unfold in various self-directed ways, even if that’s not what you could have
predicted in advance nor supposedly what you “want” it to do (in other words: ethics as a form of attention that is directed toward the “for-itself” propulsions of other persons and objects, human and inhuman). So, for me, work in post/humanism,
and in OOO, is attentive to the world, which includes and does not exile (or gleefully kill off) the human (although it certainly asks that we expand our angles of vision beyond just the human-centered ones); it is both political and ethical; and it is interested in what I would even call the “tender” attention to and care of things, human and inhuman (I think that the work of Bennett,
Bogost, Morton, Harman, Steven Shaviro, Jeffrey Cohen, Stacy Alaimo, Julian Yates, Myra Hird, Freya Matthews, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Levi Bryant, and many, many others who *never* get cited in these discussions, especially the women working in materialism, science/gender studies, queer ecology, environmental humanities, etc.) especially exemplifies this “tender” attention to and care of all of the “items” of the world. Any enlargement of our capacity to think about the agential, signaling, and other capacities of as many items/objects/persons, etc. of this world represents, in my mind, an enlargement, and not a shrinking, of our ethical attention. It’s asking for a richer, thicker ontology, which gives is more to be responsible for (after all, that’s partly where the specialness of humans comes in), but also: more to enjoy.

It seems to me that the sort of ethico-political vision that Joy here proposes has two faces. On the one hand, there is that face directed towards our contatus, our endeavor to persist in our being and flourish. Recognizing our interconnection with nonhuman things and our impact on nonhuman things is not simply some hippy-dippy thesis that “we’re one with the universe”. No. It is a matter of self-interest. It’s the recognition that 1) we are dependent on this ecosystem to flourish, 2) that these relations upon which we are dependent are fragile and can be broken, and 3) that these things can also exercise oppressive power over us, undermining our ability to flourish or live well. As Spinoza saw, we always act with other bodies. Some of these bodies enhance our power of acting, while others diminish it. By and large, ethical thought has been blind to our relations with nonhumans, focusing only on questions of how we should treat and live with other humans. Yet this completely obscures our real ethical circumstances or conditions. Today, more than ever, our collective survival depends on broadening the domain of what counts as sites of political and ethical concern, and that means taking into account our relationship to nonhumans.

On the other hand, the other face of Joy’s ethical proposal pertains to generosity. Generosity is an attitude towards alterity, towards different universes, towards different phenomenologies (or as Bogost puts it, towards alien phenomenologies). And these universes are universes of both other humans and nonhumans. If an OOO/new materialist ethic cannot embrace the dictums “love your neighbor as you love yourself“, or “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself“, or “act in such a way that you can will the maxim of your action as a universal law of nature”, then this is because all three of these imperatives, in their focus on your self and the universal, fail to enter into the domain of alien phenomenology or alterity. Not every being’s needs and desires for a flourishing conatus are the same. Treating them as the same can issue in horrific cruelty. If you’re able to experience anguish when you walk by a harpy eagle enclosed in a small cage at the zoo, you already have a sense of what generosity and its relationship to alien phenomenology is. You experience that anguish because you discern that this is no way for harpy eagles to live. Likewise, if you are attentive to the desires (in the Lacanian sense) that animate your child– to their obsessions –even where they differ quite markedly from your fantasies and ambitions, and if you make yourself an agent that helps to foster those desires, then you have a sense of what alien phenomenology and generosity are. If you work to create a workplace that’s cognizant of the needs of people with young children– if you look to find ways not to make that a penalty for them –you have a sense of what alien phenomenology and generosity are. You are opening on to the ethical calls of alterity, whether it be with people different from yourself, animals, or any number of things.

No doubt, with respect to this other side of OOE, people will say “ah ha! so you do think that the serial killer should be able to slash his victim to pieces and that the shark should be able to eat the child!” But I do not say that, because our conatus is a central part of the equation as well. These two faces will always be in tension with one another, but it is possible to expand our ethical regard beyond ourselves to develop more generous attitudes to the others that we encounter in all walks of life.

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56 Responses to “Flat Ontology/Flat Ethics”

You say that the shark shouldn’t be allowed to eat the child, but as far as I can tell, you don’t say why the shark shouldn’t be allowed to eat the child? (Besides, it’s not children who get eaten by sharks, but that is besides the point.) In other terms, why is okay for a shark to eat a seal but not eat a child? Who is allowing the shark to eat one but not the other? I don’t mean to be flippant: it’s a serious question. Who is legislating? Why are humans excluded from the palates of sharks but not seals? or tuna? or manatees? or crabs? (I don’t see how any of Eileen’s comment addresses this either.) Superficially, it looks like you are excluding anthropocentrism and then bringing it the backdoor by categorically prohibiting ocean predators (what about wolves?) from eating humans–but, based upon what you repeatedly claim, this cannot be the case.

All this seems right. I’ll be curious to see if those who have this concern–if indeed that’s the issue–find any solace in this post.

I’m not even sure what a non-anthropocentric ethical theory would look like.

Right. I make this point as well in Alien Phenomenology. It’s very difficult to imagine the ethical imperatives of objects (or “object communities”) because those methods of non-human value are inaccessible. It might be possible to exercise speculation upon them, but as I’ve previously argued, even if we could attempt such an act, we’ll never know if we hit the target or not.

thanks for your thoughts, as usual. you write “Vertical ontologies are characterized by treating on type of being as a privileged being within the order of existence, such that all other beings are dependent on that being. In contemporary thought, that being is generally treated as some variant of the human, the social, or language.”

that certainly is one dimension, though the corresponding other dimension (if you follow for example Latour in his diagnosis of the “modern” constitution) is the complete expulsion of the “human” (subjective, meaning and so on) from our onto-imaginaries. those visions are often given by proponents of a naive naturalism (of course) and in contemporary discourse by the scientistic wings in discussions about for example religion and the nature of consciousness. in their zeal “naturalism” becomes something else than a methodological working postulate for the sciences, a kind of impoverished materialism where the onto-imaginary is dominated by 3D-beings or at least beings that emerge from the representational techniques and technologies of the sciences. “you are your brain” is in their hands not the trivial statement that subjective experience and neural process described by third-person neuroscience are constitutively colocalized, but rather that the mode of existance of this neural process is somehow ontically privileged over the subjective things that also go on there. they seem to want to say that emergent imaginary worlds are less real and less potent in world-making than emergent third-person representations of chugging matter, energy and so on.

both sides can of course accuse each other of obscurantism and ignorance of whatever other half of reality lies diametrically opposite one’s own base-inclination. how an ethics would look like where beings of thought and beings not of thought would be able to demand a symmetrical inclusion in theories about ethics is still an untouched question I think, twentysomething tears after We have never been modern. how to appraoch it when it is clear that we must be careful not to over and undermine, or in a different idiom: if we have to remain faithful to the program of irreduction? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This seems right to me, Levi. It might be interesting to consider how conatus is produced and maintained in this context. That’s the next step in investigating why we might ethically prioritize those we consider to be like us. As you suggest, we develop ethical obligations toward the ecosystem when we realize that we are dependent upon the health of that system. But “we” don’t all believe that, and we don’t all understand the ecosystem in the same way. We don’t push human sacrifices into volcanoes because of the way our conatus has developed; instead, we might pull people back from the volcano’s edge. However, we do “sacrifice” 30000+ people every year in traffic accidents in the U.S. So we might consider how the assemblages in which we participate with ecosystems, volcanoes, minivans, commuting, etc. produce conatus and ethics.

Taking this one further step into abstraction, we might speculate on a general theory of how ethical values, relations, and practices emerge: a speculation that might not depend upon human participation in a system. If we think about conatus in terms of autopoiesis, then perhaps it becomes easier to think about nonhuman objects. Are ethical relations present in every object relation? If not, what ontological characteristics are needed for ethics to develop? Maybe ethical relations are so singular that a general theory of how they develop would not be useful, but if that’s the case then ethics wouldn’t be what we think it is (a general system of values we share).

In any case, such an investigation would have a goal of understanding the mechanisms by which ethical systems develop. What it would not do is tell us what our values “should” be. It would not tell us that we should or shouldn’t allow the shark to eat the child. It would instead attempt to tell us why we feel that we value the child over the shark.

I think the question of ethics in this context gets tricky because we seem inevitably to fall into the trap of thinking solely in terms of a calculus of value, a trap laid out for us by the utilitarian and analytic philosophical traditions.

The comment from Eileen Joy is beautifully stated: her vocabulary of welcoming and generosity and the notion of living-with offer a compelling path out of the morass. She seems to echo thinkers like Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and so on, for whom ethics is a matter of hospitality and compassion—responsibilities to the other that can never be met but nevertheless demand our commitment. Derrida especially writes some beautiful and passionate lines about ethics as a responsibility toward the other as the “monstrously unrecognizable,” the most dissimilar. “So long as it remains human, among men,” he writes, “ethics remains dogmatic, narcissistic, and not yet thinking. Not even thinking the human that it talks so much about” (Beast and the Sovereign 1 108). For my money, Derrida offers some good preliminary steps toward a non-anthropocentric ethics, what I prefer to call an anthropo-eccentric ethics. Not an anti-humanist ethics, of course. We are still humans speaking to other humans.

It is curious to note, however, that the second half of the quotation I cite here suggests that we have not, that we cannot, even begin to think in humanist terms until we think more profoundly about the nonhuman.

We seem far too easily led into debates about sharks and children, the sort of debates that pass for ethics in the analytic tradition. They set up these cruel and absurd scenarios and try to hash them out. Some deep ecologists would rise to the bait and allow the child to be devoured in an attempt to establish some sort of critical distance from their human subjectivity: who are we to say which being deserves to live or die, they might ask. They can and sometimes do tread into dangerous territory with a truly flat ethics that grants all entities the ethico-moral-quasi-judicial right to exist equally, such that we should not deny the natural tendency of bubonic plague to propagate its own life, should it threaten to wipe out three-quarters of the human species.

Of course, most of us would want to save the child from the shark or the plague. “Aha!” an analytic ethicist might say, “what if that child were to grow up to be another Hitler or Pol Pot?” Thus the ethicist demands that you continue the absurd calculation.

I was trapped by this sort of question asking in my dissertation defense. Responding to my arguments about the uncertainty of undecidability of artificial life—which I take up, at one point, in a discussion of the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner—he pointed out to me that I would likely be more upset with him were he to burst into my house and kick my cat than if he were to do the same to my Roomba. The argument is obvious: my cat is irreplaceable, it has a life unique to itself and to me; Roomba is eminently replaceable. I capitulated, given that it was my defense and all and he is a prominent scholar whom I admire. But my supervisor told me afterward that I should have simply rejected the terms of his critique. Which was bang on the money.

Shark or child? Serial killer or victim? I am in a position to donate a kidney to, and thus save the life of, either 1. my wife, or 2. the next Mozart or Mahatma Gandhi. Do I choose the person who has value primarily to myself, or the person who might benefit hundreds of thousands of people? Why am I being placed in this situation? These sorts of perverse questions exact an ethical violence that, I feel, reveals more about the person asking than the one who has to answer.

In the most recent Batman film, the Joker repeatedly places people in these sorts of situations. Choose the district attorney cleaning up the crime-ridden city or choose your girlfriend. Kill this one little peon or I’ll blow up a hospital. Blow up the other boat before they blow up yours.

The point I’m trying to make is: don’t be a joker! These questions are bids for sovereignty; the one positing the scenario places herself in a zone of exception, as Agamben might say, carving out a space where she can make the demand but is exempt from its consequences. They recall the arbitrary demands laid down by Yahweh in the Old Testament: sacrifice your son or renounce your God.

In The Gift of Death, Derrida performs a brilliant reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac to make a point about sacrifice and what he calls the ordeal of the decision. Rather than simply denounce the actions of Abraham, which most individuals in a largely secularized culture would likely do, he gives a remarkably sensitive account of the impossibility of the decision, the enormity of the sacrifice that is made with either choice. Ultimately, Derrida argues that the parable extends to every decision, and that the logic of the sacrifice is everywhere apparent on account of our finitude. I attend a conference to deliver a paper, but in so doing I am not spending time with my family. I go to the animal shelter and adopt one cat over all the others, some of whom may be euthanized. I purchase an Apple computer, knowing full well the working conditions at Foxxcon, the suffering and violence that likely attended the extraction of the rare earths that comprise its components by artisanal miners in the Congo, as well as the suffering that may attend its eventual disposal should it wind up in an e-scrapping village in costal China or Western Africa.

I choose the child or the shark, and in so doing sacrifice the well-being of one over the other, satisfy one’s conatus while denying the other’s.

Part of Derrida’s ethical commitment has to do with my taking responsibility for the decision, which is invariably and irreparably violent as it cuts off one future as it activates another. Such a responsibility is thus always hyperbolic, always in (infinite) excess of my ability to meet it fully, or even adequately. It is about renouncing the position of the sovereign in deciding which future is disposable, which life is expendable, which entity unworthy of being. As Haraway puts it, we must endeavour not to make lives “killable,” given the necessity of killing in order to live.

I wrote a reply to Levi last night, but it got disappeared, likely when WordPress forced me to login or it was marked as spam.

The gist of my comment was that “conatus” isn’t an argument; it’s a concept. It comes back to why the human conatus is such that a fat, juicy, piece of flaying human-flesh in the waters just outside Miami is not food for a shark while a fat, juicy, piece of flaying manatee-flesh in the waters just outside Miami is shark food. Your argument–as I am reading and understanding it, thus meaning that the problem could be me and my inability to understand–is that no, the shark cannot eat the kid because the human has a human conatus and a human conatus takes priority over a shark’s conatus. I’m asking why. Why is the fat, juicy kid intrinsically un-eatable while the manatee is intrinsically eatable? Why does the human conatus to persevere over time trump the shark’s conatus to persevere over time? Not being eaten is as much about self-preservation for the human as eating is about self-preservation for the shark. Asserting the fat, juicy, corn syrup fed child as un-eatable looks a lot like bringing anthropocentrism through the backdoor when it comes to ethics. Contrary to your reassurance, no where do you address this in this post or in the comments. If you’ve done so elsewhere and I’ve missed it, please direct me. Assume I’m an idiot, if you must–it might be true.

Per your second comment directed at me. Yes, of course, I agree. Deontological approaches to animals remain anthropocentric. I don’t deny this. In fact, I’ve made this argument myself numerous times. On the other hand, a utilitarianism of Singer’s sort is rather un-anthropocentric when applied rigourously: all that matters is the fact of suffering; hence, anything that can suffer is in. But, by the same token, anything that cannot suffer is out–hence, ecosystems, mountains, planets, and so on are excluded. This isn’t particularly satisfactory. But, at the same, I’m sure you know that there are a number of people trying to talk about ethics in non-anthropocentric terms: Diamond, Calarco, James, myself–you, I hope.

Just to clarify, is the position against OOE of the opinion that a well grounded humanist ethics DOES stop shark attacks? I have only interacted with a few sharks but my general experience is that admonishing the immorality of their eating habits is about as effective as telling hipsters Ipads are made by slaves. As for serial killers few murders are as ethical. They generally follow a strict code for target acquisition and are even more ethical, that is careful (in the sense of sorge, that is attentive) when it comes to the killing of their prey. Certainly their attention to killing is more ethical than the indiscriminate killing most of us require of our nation-state to maintain the global disparities of security.
But I think the cynicism of Craig’s ‘point’ and David Berry’s plea on behalf of the subjects of late capitalism has little to do with ethics in the sense of practices, an ethos. Instead they fear that OOO/OOE/SR/NM may not have sufficient righteous anger against capitalism and worse yet a firm grasp of the ‘good’ for which we must all agree upon. I have never met a serial killer but I have met a few capitalists and I have to say they seem even more indifferent than sharks and serial killers and it is not because of the distraction of ‘object litanies.’ And I doubt the fortitude of my ethics would make much of a difference to their practices. I am reminded of the absurd history of animal trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial) or the more recent discussion of whether to ‘destroy’ the Orca that kiled one of its trainers. Are we really better organisms if we can build an edifice of species provincialism that enables us to judge Orcas, serial killers,sharks, and capitalists. Or to put somewhat differently are the tactical actions against such dangerous forms of conatus really undermined by our inability to judge with certainty that we are moral superior to them? Further must we, as thinkers, always be in the judging mood or is possible to allow our modes of perception to dilate from time to time to see what other kinds of things provoke us. It seems that only a very frightened and dare I saw cowardly philosopher would feel the need to police the boundaries of thinking. In some sense only a philosopher with the least faith in the ‘good’ they are trying to defend. As it would seem that if such a good were vital it would likely steer us back when we stray to far. If doesnt well solars flares happen and sometimes the destroy whole planets. As it was his bday I am reminded of a great passage from Whitman “The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.” I think its ok if we are poets some of the time and not judges all of the time. I seriously doubt humans will, on a significant scale, switch sides and feed their children to the sharks. Beyond 12 Monkeys (La Jetee) and few other films Deep Ecologist have never really gotten much traction. So I wonder what else is fueling the affective economy behind the moral panic.

It seems clear that any kind of realism must somehow separate ‘is’ and ‘ought’ — ontology and ethics. Those who take OOO’s ontology to be an ethics and criticise it on these grounds simply perform a category error. They confuse quite different regimes of truth.

On the question of the ‘anthropocentrism’ of ethics I think we need to be careful. In one sense ethics is and can only be anthropocentric insofar as it is a human construct. For me, ethics pertains to the relationship between (a) humans and humans and (b) humans and other non-human things. I don’t think that speaking of ethical relations between (c) non-humans and other non-humans makes much sense. This kind of limited anthropocentrism is unavoidable.

However, a broader and much more disagreeable anthropocentrism would deny (b) and take ethics to pertain only to relations between humans and other humans. In denying (b) it would make non-human things, at best, passive objects of subjective ethical discourse, unable to make any contribution of their own and without any intrinsic ethical import. It is this pejorative sense of anthropocentrism that must be resisted.

Although ethics is only thinkable in the presence of humans, non-human things must be granted the capacity, under the right conditions, of making themselves agents in the procedure of ethics. How? By having requirements for their well-being. Of course these requirements can only be made present in the discourse by human representatives but that should not make the non-humans ethically secondary; it just means that they are non-present, they cannot ‘speak for themselves’.

The quality of an ethical system should be judged by its sensitivity to the requirements and objections of whatever agents can be represented in the discussion. The agent’s capacity to ‘represent themselves’ should no more determine their inclusion or exclusion than a defendant’s ability to defend themselves in a court of law determines whether they get a fair trial or not.

I suppose then that what we are talking about is the separation between being and well-being — questions of ontology and ethics, respectively. Non-humans have a central place in both discussions, although their place does differ in either case.

I don’t have a response to your argument here. It seems to me that it is a primitive and obvious fact that we strive to preserve our lives and the lives of those like us. As a primitive fact I don’t see how any further reason can be given for it. I don’t let the shark eat my daughter because I love her.

Craig I think understand you understand your position a little better on sharks as restated it is lighter on snark. However I did not understand that conatus makes a moral difference to sharks. Vis-a-vis the sharks conatus seals and humans are relatively similar (if we are talking about bull sharks or tiger sharks, as most other sharks seem to prefer non-human/non-dolphin mammals in the form of seals or fish after all let us not be shark essentialist. I would hate to be accused of species profiling). The conatus, for Spinoza and Levi, as far as I can tell, is the reason why humans prefer their offspring over sharks. Not because sharks are immoral or humans are moral but because one intensifies the conatus and, well, one allows it to be eaten. Which is to say the argument about conatus is claim against the argument about OOO leading to ‘arbitrary’ or anti-anthro ethics. I think conatus is a concept for understanding will or drive that suggest such a misanthropy is unlikely to happen and even more unlikely to ‘feel’ good. So conatus is more of a safety net for ethical explorations outside the boundaries of the homo sapiens sapiens than it is a compass.
Also it would seem useful not to conflate Humanism and anthropocentrism. Humanism follows a very narrow trajectory out of Europe into the world mostly via colonialism and violence. It has the most constricted view of what we are as embodied, lived abstractions, of meat and brains. Anthropocentrism on the other hand, particularly when it comes to ethics, is much more durable. While most modern humans have 6 to 7 percent (some having as much as 13 percent) neanderthal or other homo DNA we are all basically embodied in the same way. Thus our ethics, as practices, will also be in a dynamic but bounded relay with the bodies we have. There can be some additions that make a difference (think Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about motility and eyeglasses or fake limbs extended to new assemblages of technical interfaces, something like Mark B.N. Hansen’s work) in how our bodies perceive and intervene in the world but we cant not be what we already becoming. We cant speculatively engage in the life of a tick but we can become a tick, or better yet if we could anthropocentrism would be as silly a claim because we would be ticks not humans and therefore incapable of the perceptive embodied apparatus of the anthropos.
Also sorry if the slapdash writing of the last response seemed as if I was lumping you together with David Berry. Not my intent.

Levi: “I don’t let the shark eat my daughter because I love her.” Alright, but this isn’t the argument. The issue is why sharks shouldn’t eat kids as such. No doubt you want your daughter to survive if she’s attacked by the shark. But this isn’t the issue! The issue is that you’ve prioritized kids as such over sharks as such and the reason you’ve given is that humans have a human conatus. Either this comes down to an anthropocentrism: ethics means that humans are absolutely and categorically protected from being eaten by other creatures, including humans. It’s an odd human exceptionalism, isn’t it? Especially for someone making the ontological claims you are making?

Ontologically you are saying, humans are one sort of thing among many sort of things and there is no way to prioritize one sort of thing over any other sort of thing. This is clearly non-anthropocentric. Ethically you are saying, humans are not one sort of thing among many other sort of things and there is a way to prioritize the human sort of thing from all other sorts of things. This is clearly anthropocentric. (The other possibility is that you are defending a variant of egotism that you altruistically extend to your kin–but only because they are your kin–and, perhaps, things that happen to be like you. This doesn’t appear to be properly ethical and it doesn’t tell us why the shark can’t eat the human or shouldn’t eat the human because there is no reason to take your ego over the shark’s ego. After all, when you jump into the water to heroically save your daughter, why shouldn’t the shark eat you too? Will your father materialize to enforce the ethical priority of the human? And when he’s eaten, will his father materialize? Talk about #nodads! But then, isn’t a properly ethical act one which sets your own self-interest aside? Wouldn’t the ethical act to be to selflessly offer your daughter to the shark and come back with your next born in a few years? Put in other terms, if ethics is doing what you want, then it isn’t ethics: it’s nihilism.)

I just don’t see how you can derive a hierarchical moral theory from an egalitarian ontology. Or, if you will, argue that a hierarchical moral theory is not in contradiction with a flat ontology. Why isn’t it flat all the way down? Why can’t it be flat all the way down?

You’re also making a category mistake, as others have observed. You can’t derive an ought from an is. Nothing about my ontology prescribes an ethics one way or another. As I argued in this post, I advocate a flat ontology NOT a flat ethics. Im not suggesting the sharks actions are morally wrong– I don’t even know what that would mean –the shark is just doing what sharks do. I’m certainly going to privilege human lives over shark’s lives, however.

Incidentally, what would count as ethics and grounds for an ethics for you? In a Spinozist framework, conatus is the ground of all ethics. Within the framework, the aim is to organize encounters and relations with other things that enhance your capacity for acting and your joyous affects. Under this model, the shark is bad (for *us*– it’s perspectival –because it destroys our conatus. It is bad for us for the shark to eat other people because other people are the principal means by which our power of acting is enhanced. Hence we wish to preserve them.

What exactly are you asking for and are you claiming it’s good for sharks to eat people?

I’m not sure, Levi — How is the privileging of the lives of humans different from privileging the human in philosophy? If a flat ontology is one that shows respect for the non-human, at what point does this respect become an ethical concern and collapse into self-preservation? I don’t think it’s quite so easy to keep ethics and ontology separate. On the contrary, one can still challenge the possibility of a flat ontology — on the very grounds that you give for doubting the existence of a non-anthropocentric ethics. The assumption being that an ontology, like an ethics, is for humans. No?

There’s a big difference between pointing out that ontology is a human discourse and arguing that beings are dependent on humans for their reality and existence. It’s this second claim that SR and OOO are rejecting. I’m not sure what a non-anthropocentric ethics would look like. Minimally we’d have to show that nonhumans engage in moral reasoning and have moral codes that are binding on us. I don’t see how we can show that. The sharks action, in my view, is neither moral nor immoral. It’s just doing what sharks do.

(1) You are happy to be ethically anthropocentric. Great. I’m trying to figure out why because I can’t see how you can coherently arrive at this position. If nothing else, moving from a flat world to a bumpy ethics takes at least a bit of reasoning and argumentation. I’m asking for a coherent reason why. The best you’ve come up, as far as I can tell, is a series of assertions: viz., (i) your daughter and (ii) there’s something special about the human conatus vis a vis any other and all other conatuses. By asserting these you are merely begging the question. Neither of these are arguments and they don’t go anywhere in getting you from a flat ontology to a hierarchical ethics.

(2) I am not deriving a normative claim from a descriptive claim because I haven’t made any normative claims at all! To be clear, at no point have I claimed that it is good that the shark eats human fatlings; I’m asking why it is bad–what if, ethically speaking, it I’m trying to find out how you are deriving your normative claims given your descriptive claims. Remember: I’m sympathetic to the flat ontology and its anti-anthropocentrism; I’m also sympathetic to a flat ethics and its anti-anthropocentrism–I’m just not sure what it looks like. If anthropocentrism is out with respect to ontology, I want to know why anthropocentrism is in with respect to ethics. I want to know two things: (i) why aren’t your critics right–that is, why shouldn’t the shark be allowed to eat the human fatling and, more to the point, why shouldn’t we affirm the criticism? (ii) if ethics demands hierarchy in the order of beings, why and how?

To your question as to a ground for ethics: I don’t know! This is precisely the problem, isn’t it? But I don’t see how a conatus-centric account avoids any of the problems we get from the other major schools. I’d have to guess, though, that ethics involves setting yourself aside–your interest, your preservation, your desire–for the other. If ethics involves in the relation of “the self” to “the other” the relation only exists insofar as there is an “other.” It depends upon “the other.” This is where we must begin; not with ourselves. Getting back to the example at hand, I don’t think we can enter into the shark/fatling/non-fatling with a preconceived notion of what is right: the shark merits its own exist; the child merits its own existence. Qua existence, they are equal. There is nothing inherently “better” about the shark than the human just as there is nothing inherently “better” about the human than the shark–but then, in terms of net-harm on the world, the human is far more dangerous and far more destructive than the shark. I’ve already pointed to Calarco’s work on this ethical agnosticism as a starting place. Apparently you aren’t interested.

Maybe conatus provides a way out of this, but as the concept has been mobilized in this discussion I’m just not seeing it. I don’t see how your version of conatus isn’t anything but nihilistic egoism. You and yours always takes priority over them and theirs. This is madness.

The shark has proven a distraction of sorts, so let me try to steer the conversation in a different direction.

The question for OOE isn’t whether or not the shark should eat the child for the child, but rather whether the shark should eat the child for the shark. This is the part that’s unthinkable, for Levi and me. It’s not enough to appeal to speciation or survival or instinct here. What does the shark think that sharks should do? That’s what we should be talking about when we talk about OOE. And I’m not sure we’ll make much progress… my previous response to this challenge is on pp 72-78 of Alien Phenomenology. Here’s one of the things I say about it there:

We can imagine scores of bizarro Levinases, little philosopher machines sent into the sensual interactions of objects like planetary rovers. Their mission: to characterize the internal, withdrawn subjectivities of various objects, by speculating on how object–object caricatures reflect possible codes of value and response. Object ethics, it would seem, can only ever be theorized once-removed, phenomenally, the parallel universes of private objects cradled silently in their cocoons, even while their surfaces seem to explode, devour, caress, or murder one another.

I know there has been some explicit resistance to engaging with Calarco’s work due to his role in the Derrida Wars (which was only permitted to take place here by virtue of Levi’s hospitality) but coincidentally enough an interview was just posted in which Matt lays out his thinking on some of these matters. I’ll link below but I’d also like to excerpt this section on veganism:

Counter to some animal ethicists who view animals and humans as being fundamentally inedible and who build their veganism on a kind of absolute prohibition of consumption, this alternative way of seeing humans and animals as sharing a zone of indistinct, meaty, consumable embodiment gives rise to another kind of veganism. Vegans of this sort, among which I would count myself, avoid eating meat as much as possible not because animals should not be seen as meat. Animals are potentially meat; they (and we!) can be eaten, are eaten, and will be eaten. But what we know—we fellow meaty, embodied beings who practice this sort of veganism—what we know is that animal bodies can be much more than “mere” meat.

Modern factory farms and animal industries try to reduce animals to “mere” meat (the scare quotation marks are there because nothing is “mere” to my mind, not even processed meat), to make us think that their bodies are capable of nothing more than ending up as beef, pork, or various byproducts on our plates or on our bodies. So, yes, animals are potentially meat to be eaten—but they are potentially more than that as well. Veganism is an attempt to release animals into these additional potentials, into these other possibilities. It is an effort to release them from a world and an established order that has blocked them from constituting their own worlds, their own relations, their own becomings, joys, and passions. As such, veganism of this sort is not a hatred or disgust of meat or of embodiment, but a profound identification with and passion for meaty bodies and their wide range of potentials. Moreover, veganism of this sort is also an effort to release ourselves into other possibilities, potentials, and passions. Who knows what we might become when we try eating more thoughtfully, more respectfully? Who knows what we might become when rethink who we are and who animals are?

Actually I have Calarco’s book sitting on my bookshelf. I just haven’t been able to get to it yet. I also have no particular hostility to Derrida– I have a highly sympathetic article coming out on him soon –just hostility to a certain Derrideanism I endured years ago.

For those of us who know then, it is obvious that Levi and Lizzie love one another. I would be a tragedy for whoever survived therefore if either of them were eaten by a shark. but I’m not sure this gets us to ethics.

At the end of his post above N.S. Anderson writes something which, at least in an anthropological fashion, might get us to an ethics.

We are part of a great set of entities with Levi’s vision of a flat ecology which share the necessity of eating (all animals, some plants, perhaps black holes, but who knows whether eating is the right word). Eating is just one way in which our lives come to us from outside ourselves. Like many of the aforementioned entities, we are the result of our parents’ sexual acts (and so on all the way back to the emergence of sexual difference with in the biosphere. Our form requires that we be entangled (in Ian Hodder’s sense, see The Leopard’s Tale) with many elements of, many forces within, nature as we find it. Additionally, humans are profoundly neonatal, more profoundly so than other entities we know of in this planet’s biosphere. With us it is always a question of both nature and nurture.

What all these forms of entanglement share is a degree of assymmetry, and thus a degree of incompleteness. Thus, they pose problems for the logic of gift exchange as developed by Mauss and Levi-Strauss.

(Note I find Levi’s static Levi-Strauss as incomprehensibly unrecognizable as he finds my Levi-Strauss in motion. I suggest that this difference in understanding comes from our having read different parts of the great man’s writings. I was trained in all the kinship stuff, the order of orders from social structure, bricolage and the way of the mask. I am not interested in debating which interpretation, if either, is correct).

The usual logic of gift exchange rests on three obligations: (1) to give, (2) to receive, and (3) to give in return. For this logic to work that which is exchanged must be of similar value but different from what comes at a later time in return. Hence the problem of assymmetry and of what, following Errington and Gewertz, I call ontological debt. This is a pretty common sort of idea around the world. In a slightly older version of Japan, for example, such debts were termed giri (unpayable) versus gumi (payable debts) where giri was sufficiently strong that it could come into conflict with ninjo (human feeling). Such an idea is not terribly common here in Texas; after an entire semester some ofmy students still don’e get it.

This general situation suggests to me at least of getting from a flat ontology via a homonid ecology (nice concept, more below) through the assymetries that come with having our lives come to us from outside ourselves, our incompleteness, even as we must engage those outside forces. (I’ve been reading K Lewin, so I mean to make a topological distinction). The question isn’t whether Lizzie should or should not be eaten by a shark. The question is one of which forces or combination of forces within a flat ecology give rise to obligations and for whom are those obligations themeslves forces within the flat ecology.

Great comment. I wonder if you might say a bit about sacrifice in this context, whether human or otherwise, as there we do find instances of us giving ourselves over to something else. With respect to the logic of the gift you talk about, you might find that this post borders on some of what you have to say:

To clarify– and I think this is where the discussion with Craig got muddled –in this post I argue that regard for the nonhuman can be arrived at via two routes. One route, which Craig seems to object to, is that of self-interest. Here the issue is one of what I’ve called our “conatus” or endeavor to persist in our being. When we recognize that our conatus is imbricated or entangled with a broader ecological world upon which we are dependent, we no longer seen willful destruction and exploitation of nonhumans as reasonable or acceptable because, insofar as we live from these nonhumans, we’re destroying ourselves when we do this. Here the reason that we don’t destroy the sharks is that we recognize that no matter how remote from us, we recognize that they play a vital role in the ecosystem upon which we depend. To destroy them is to destroy ourselves. Craig finds this to be a horrible argument arising from egoism, but 1) if we are to be naturalists, I fail to see how we can deny the fact that all living beings have a will to endure in their being (it’s interesting that Craig never discusses the question of why there isn’t “seal exceptionalism” in the case of the seal trying to protect its life from the shark), and 2) I don’t see why we should avoid enlightened self-interest arguments in trying to fight things like climate change and capitalistic exploitation. For many I think these sorts of arguments are far more persuasive than arguments that seek to “sanctify” nature.

However, I also argue that we can cultivate attitudes of generosity towards alterity or beings different from ourselves and seek to attend to their needs even though doing so doesn’t benefit our self-interest in any particular way. As I write in the post:

the other face of Joy’s ethical proposal pertains to generosity. Generosity is an attitude towards alterity, towards different universes, towards different phenomenologies (or as Bogost puts it, towards alien phenomenologies). And these universes are universes of both other humans and nonhumans. If an OOO/new materialist ethic cannot embrace the dictums “love your neighbor as you love yourself“, or “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself“, or “act in such a way that you can will the maxim of your action as a universal law of nature”, then this is because all three of these imperatives, in their focus on your self and the universal, fail to enter into the domain of alien phenomenology or alterity. Not every being’s needs and desires for a flourishing conatus are the same. Treating them as the same can issue in horrific cruelty. If you’re able to experience anguish when you walk by a harpy eagle enclosed in a small cage at the zoo, you already have a sense of what generosity and its relationship to alien phenomenology is. You experience that anguish because you discern that this is no way for harpy eagles to live. Likewise, if you are attentive to the desires (in the Lacanian sense) that animate your child– to their obsessions –even where they differ quite markedly from your fantasies and ambitions, and if you make yourself an agent that helps to foster those desires, then you have a sense of what alien phenomenology and generosity are. If you work to create a workplace that’s cognizant of the needs of people with young children– if you look to find ways not to make that a penalty for them –you have a sense of what alien phenomenology and generosity are. You are opening on to the ethical calls of alterity, whether it be with people different from yourself, animals, or any number of things.

This argument is not an argument from self-interest, but an argument for us to sympathize and empathize both with other humans that are very different from us and with other nonhumans. We can seek to understand their universes, their drives and aims, and what constitutes flourishing for them, and in doing so choose not to impede their aims– so long as they don’t destroy us –and to foster their aims.

My friend Nikki Tannenbaum does her fieldwork in northern Thailand among the Shan. One day some guy she did not know from Adam drove up in a truck and offered her a refrigerator ( a big gift here, very big there). I do not know whether Nikki had what I’ve sometimes called her American moment (dinner costing too much and some bloke wanting everyone knows what in retuen) or not. He knew she was from the outer world and wanted access to her connectons. In exchange he offered not just the refrigerator (the opening gambit) but also his connections into the Shan world, those connections being something he would have known she would find valuable. In much of the owlrd, relations begin in a frank self interest which does not necessarily connote the sorts of corruption via self interest so many of our students simply assume.

To sacrifice as both opening gambit and as return. (BTW I think tyou’d be interested in Stephen Lansing’s Perfect Order to which these comments are something of a response).

Balinese have until recently predominantly been wet rice farmers. They live on a volcanic island with very high mountains and very deep vallies (I don’t think I spelled that properly; I plead dyslexia). Anyway, over the last 1,000 years or so, these folks have built up an improvized series of tunnels, weirs and so on to bring water to their subak (regions of irrigation as well as groups of farmers drawing water from a single source). This involves the farmers in a series of exchanges (hence obligations) with a number of sources of life. Traditionally we anthropologists have refered here to spirits, but we’re discussing Balinese Siwite understanding so actually everything works well in the terms of your flat ecology. No outside of nature, so no no supernatural. No incoporeal beings, because spirits = material forces. So the Lord of the Land is the fecundity of the earth. The Lady of the Lake (Dewi Danau) is the tranformative power of water. The Lady who is Rice suffers great wounds and dies for us. We can open the Land (mebabad means to clear while babd are a genre of literature often refered to as geneaologies, really accounts of events in the lives of significant previous forms of currently incarnated beings) because we enter into an agreement with the Lord of the Land (Banaspati Raja). In exchange for life there must be a series of returns (offerings including sacrifices where the spirits eat the essence (isin) and the community of concerned persons eat the leftovers (placing themselves below). Everyday, the farmers lay out offerings (offers in Dutch and German means both offering and sacrifice) at the highest point in their field, the point the water enters. They thereby renew their community of farmers and spirits and their entanglements thereto every day (see Roy Rappaport’s essay on some obvious elements of ritual…actually see the response to Rappaport’s work on ritual and ecology generally).

Lansing makes a couple of ethnographic errors in his analysis (at least I think so), but he makes the very interesting point that development types completely missed the operations of the subak during the green revolution. Science will out, so lots of chemical fertilizers resulted in algae blooms, dying refs and so forth). There were also problems with the new dams and the way that they diverted water. So Balinese farmers began destroying those and replacing them with their older style weirs. Most problematically, because science knows best, the development types also missed the very simple method by which the Balinese completely reordered entire water systems simply by having each subak (in the sense of the congregation of farmers sharing a single source of water) follow the planting pattern of the most successful of its four neighbors. So there is continual shift as groups of farmers up and down the mountains readjust their activities with each new planting.

The difficulty with sacrifice, at least for us, comes not so much in the sorts of sacrifices I allude to above, but rather to those sacrifices which take place during really bad times. We are not sacrificng anything unless that which we sacrifice is of real and persistent value. Something very important must be at stake. The sun must be capable of going out (Aztec) or the world must be unstable (highland Andes, where prepubescent girls sometimes climbed up into the mountains on behalf of their communities and are preserved for us because like mummies and potatoes freezedried ) or the like. Here we find desperation and a willingness to do that which we would prefer not to have to do. Alternatively we also find great empathy for others on the part of those who willingly become the sacrifical victim. Sacrifice amy involve death, but it is not executuion in the sense we practice execution in Texas (may that end soon). The bog people were very often nobles and killed multiple ways before their bodies were given over to the lower world. The broadly catholic world tends to regard JC on the cross in much this same way….one complete obation for the sins of the entire world.

None of this need be about joy or entail joy though it certainly can. I take joy in the kittens we rescued and who live (because we feed them no doubts) in our back yard and sometimes in the house. When we found them they were to small to do anything but cry and they were very wet. So we dried them, and fed them. Now they and their kin come to breakfast and dinner, let us touch them (even pet and hold). They seek out our company, and they purr wneh we hold them, and they want to touch noses and they want their meat.

I hope this helps. The thoughts are preliminary….more a laying out a field than exhaustive.

Another story I forgot to tell this one from my friend Steve Sharp who worked for yeats among the Whippewan up near Great Bear and Great Slave lakes. These folks are hunter gatheres (and more hunting than gathering). nt down to the edge of the lake and watched a fully profieicent hunter empty his rifle at a loon which was not more than 25 meters or do from the shore as I recal. Maybe 50. But still well within shooting distance. The man kept shooting and missing. Afterwards, Steve asked the man why he had not been able to hit the loon. The man said that the loon had not consented to die. This says clearly that for these folks all successfulk hunting (unpon which they rely) depends upon the willingness of the prey to sacrifice themselves for the good of the hunter and his people.

You mark generosity: “Generosity is an attitude towards alterity.” But is it an attitude or an affect what is wanted by a modern ethical ontology? The feeling flaneur does not seem to be any more ethically effective than the 18th century’s sentimental tourist. If we need an ooo orientation, it might be deemed appreciation, not just of “me” for “it” but of the locale’s mutual enfolding: I am not doing the world a favor – nor it me. I do not think it is a “blessedness” that we “keep our lusts in check” (Ethics V 42). Is my best conatus that I understand myself within a tranquil close encounter of the 3rd kind? What is it – in short — that OOO causes us to do? If nothing, that may be no fault of OOO in particular. The disregard in which philosophy is held (and that’s on a good day since mostly it’s not regarded at all) is perhaps because it is appropriate to view it as irrelevant and inconsequent. I tend to think that those accusations are largely true though I do not think they mean philosophy is in error. If we live in a global melt-down, what does morality mean? Is it meaningful for me to be careful about my footprint while humanity adds 80,000,000 a year? Nero looks good in comparison: Rome was just a city. BTW I do not have any great ideas, but I think this is not just my stupidity. The scale of our moral-environental problem has passed our capacity for address. What should the manners have been in Masada?

Regarding Ian’s comment on the thought for the shark as to whether the shark should eat the child: I agree that other objects exist independently of humans. But if the conversation is to make any sense, OOE and OOO should be kept parallel, which means to ask what is the ontology of objects for the shark? Isn’t that equally unthinkable? And if not, isn’t OOO just as anthropocentric as OOE is (so far)?

I’m grasping for language here, which is not, I think, a bad place to be! Basically when I talk about “generosity”, I’m talking about something like Levinas’s opening on to alterity; an attitude that attends to the other without seeking or expecting anything in return. With that said, while I readily recognize that my thought might be pervaded by all sorts of political and ethical prejudices, I don’t think my onticology entails any particular ethics or politics one way or the other. This is because I think ontology, or the question of what is, is also a question indifferent to what ought to be. One could be a eco-Marxist onticologist (as I am), a neoliberal onticologist, a Fascist onticologist, an anarchist onticologist, etc. This is because whether or not something is is distinct from whether or not something ought to be. The atomic bomb is. It is a real entity out there in the world. But whether it ought to be– and I don’t think it should be –is an entirely different question.

Ontology doesn’t entail a politics or ethics, though it can be contaminated by political and ethical prejudices as the science and technology theorists show. We need a discourse distinct from ontology to discuss politics and ethics. At the very most, ontology can show that a political or ethical position is untenable because it has mistaken ontological presuppositions. For example, I think that onticology shows that neoliberalism is an untenable political position because it presupposes a world of self-made humans that don’t have to navigate networks of other entities or what I call “regimes of attraction” and that aren’t dependent on these other entities in order to exist. From an ontological standpoint, all I can suggest is that neoliberalism is based on an absurd ontology. But I have to enter into an entirely discourse– a discourse beyond ontology –to discuss what ought to be. That said, I do think that onticology and the new materialisms make us more aware of how we’re entangled with a broader world of nonhumans without which we’re unable to be or act. I think that’s something of value, given that phenomenology, the post-structuralisms, the structuralisms, and critical theory have tended to treat humans as beings that are sovereigns of the world, determining it purely through their significations, and where they’ve been prone to treating culture/society as a domain entirely autonomous from “nature”. Cultivating awareness of how we’re embedded in a world of nonhumans, dependent on that world, and are not little gods that create everything in our own image is, I believe, a step in the right direction. Not only do we need a “liberation of the proletariat”, but a liberation of things from the exploitative attitudes that arise from humanism (post-structuralism, phenomenology, structuralism, linguistic idealism, critical theory, etc) and capitalism.

In our discussions I’ve gotten the sense that you never quite understood this point because you’ve perpetually seen the defense of realism as a defense of scientific calculation (a tick on your part). You never seemed to grasp that the issue has never been scientific representation but recognition of the nonhumans that make the world and our own being possible, and that the aim has been the very opposite of domination.

I discuss this issue in detail in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects and Bogost writes an entire book on this issue entitled Alien Phenomenology. OOO is every bit as much a perspectivism as it is a realism. With that said, it’s important to remember that whether or not a being is has nothing to do with how another being strong grasps it. There are all sorts of beings that people and sharks don’t grasp and that they can scarcely imagine that are nonetheless entirely real. Esseestnotpercipe.

Dave, I’d say that trying to characterize the philosophy or philosophical practice of nonhuman entities is well within the purview of speculative realism. But that doesn’t change the fundamental realist claim of OOO, namely that (in my version) all things exist equally. This is what Levi means when he calls OOO both a perspectivism and a realism.

Obviously, we humans have many ontological claims, and if indeed sharks or toasters do ontology, it’s possible to consider what theirs might be too. Thus the weirdness of all of this stuff.

In any case, I suppose a more accurate version of my original comment would be to say that for me and for the moment the more interesting question would ask about the shark’s ethics, rather than what we humans should do it. There’s so much philosophy to be done, I don’t think we need to settle on a single move and judge all others against it.

There’s a scene in Winchester 73 where an argument occurs – if I remember — where Jimmy Stuart claims to have shot through an already extant hole in a tossed coin. As the second bullet pass leaves no new mark, it’s hard to tell the difference between a hit and a miss. Sometimes I feel that way about your reactions to my posts, Levi. You seem to shoot through a hole you discover but I sometimes wonder if you are so accurate or you shot at somewhere else altogether. Let’s take this response.

Let me start by standing back as you place your response in part in what you understand of me (which may be right though I often do not recognize myself in your reflection – that hole again). I am afraid to characterize your positions with easy vocabulary since that must fall into inaccuracy since what I understand is that your philosophical sophistication informs your moral stance, and your positions are deep and nuanced, and you do not brook error in your characterization. So, My understanding of you will in finite time and with my limited ability almost certainly supply further fodder for an accusation that I am misrepresenting you, but that is not my desire. IAC, I see you as a highly ethical individual and I think that informs nearly everything you write. Further, I “see,” although not always on the surface, a political layer tied to that moral commitment. Moving to a smaller scale, it seems obvious that this same stance informs your sense of family and self. Not atypically, all this seems tied up with a desire for truth that was – to circle back – of the essence in your OOO ruminations. All this to me seems to fuel your unbelievably productive and laudable efforts (I know my oft stated admiration for you may get tedious and even counter-productive but as the point here is that you often seem to find me more critical than is my conscious intention, I feel I should repeat my admiration as it is always true however much I may find what I deem your sometimes prickliness annoying).

You say below you were “grasping for language,” I hope I did not imply that was not ok. Still, you are quite a wordsmith and thinking about the exact meaning of words in dialog does not seem to disrespect the process you/we want here. On the Levinas tendency of generosity, I did not think that quite suited what I understand of what you do (I was thinking of Derrida on L in ), and the term I suggested was more of what I thought you did do: this suggestion I did not see to be purely critical. Indeed, my whole note – written in a fit of major depression about the world – is in the subjunctive: “If we need an ooo orientation.” Maybe you heard a silent “at all” – if so, I apologize (the bullet hole?). I was not trying to say what you were doing so much as saying how I felt about the position of philosophy and the world generally. Maybe such banalities do not belong here.

There was a greater implied criticism you do not directly address in my issue with the conatus and how effective it is as a useful term in this context. While saying anything here did and does make me nervous since Spinoza is so big and admired by so many, I thought I could quote that passage from the end of the Ethics as it seems to celebrate an affect that does not in itself call for action. Maybe that’s what you are addressing when you remark, “whether or not something is is distinct from whether or not something ought to be.” I suspect this gets us closer to a crux for me, not for you necessarily.

Perhaps, my reaction is part of what you graciously see as an autonomic response in me, my “tick,” my lack of understanding. Still, it might be that I still do not agree with everything you say. You seem to have a better and different view of my mental processes than I do. You state: “ Cultivating awareness of how we’re embedded in a world of nonhumans, dependent on that world, and are not little gods that create everything in our own image is, I believe, a step in the right direction. …you never quite understood this point because you’ve perpetually seen the defense of realism as a defense of scientific calculation (a tick on your part). You never seemed to grasp that the issue has never been scientific representation but recognition of the nonhumans that make the world and our own being possible, and that the aim has been the very opposite of domination.” You have made these judgments about me in the past as well and as here I think you are speaking to someone else. Is this that bullet hole again? Let me blow it up to the size of a donut or maybe a life preserver.

I will need to break out what I understand to be your claims. Do I believe that we are “embedded in a world of non humans”? Yes, I have said so many times, and indeed that is the despairing cry of the post. However, I do not accept what I think you are implying. I do not view this exactly the way you do. Again, this goes back to the ought and the is and how separable those are or can be. Perhaps you think I am suggesting here that humans as the “dominant and masterful species” need to help the non-human or something. If anything, I believe the “opposite” and I thought that is what I stated. It is our lack of understanding of the world in which we are embedded which is the problem. Why is it a problem as the world will be whether we will or not? We may take most local life with us and that also is not an ontological problem, but it is one for that class of things to which you and I belong: the living, the organic. Does such a recognition of fact mean I do not share your concern for the environs? On the contrary, it makes the need to understand what we are not more pressing within the nexus we occupy: I nodded when you spoke of enlightened self-interest. To put it closer, the reason ontology cannot be understood abstractly at all is because that ignores exactly the embedding you espouse. Ontology is not a thing apart but itself a relation embedded in all others. To the degree it eschews this connection in order to master its field “separately” and abstractly it is the problem for misrepresents its own situatedness: this is a contact between the ought and the is since the ought is.

Let’s go back to where you puppet me. “You never
seemed to grasp that the issue has never been scientific representation but recognition of the
nonhumans that make the world and our own being possible, and that the aim has been the very opposite of domination.” There is so much implied here and I think presumed that it is hard to unpack. However, let try to understand what you understand of me or, more important, the position I try to espouse. What can or should “the recognition of nonhumans” consist of? Recognition itself seems to offer a mental flavor on this relation and suggests a kind dualism I do not think you hold. If one accepts, as I do, that we exist in a world that we do not dominant and even more that we cannot dominant but must (what’s that word again?) appreciate is the record of science one that has had that effect in the (depends how you count) some few hundreds of years it has been a major force in our collective activity? I would answer “No!” Indeed, the opposite: science has been the mechanism by which we have grown arrogant in our disregard of the non-human. Now the usual reaction to this rotten record is – and I think this is one you hold but I do not presume to speak for you – that these errors of the military/industrial complex are not those of “pure” (who uses that word?) science but its abuse. Even if that is true – and I do not think it is nor do I think one could prove such a utopian misreading – does that mean that we should not be questioning about what the methods of science do? And you do, your love (some on your “heroes” list) of Latour, Stengers, Bashkar, etc. makes evident you do not have an ideologically rigid attitude toward science, and I hope neither do I but I do not think that is the major point – at least not for me.
The scientific parsing of the world is of little help at any conjuncture except insofar as that conjuncture is reduced to a horrendously misrepresented reduction of that event. Take any and every moment and ask “what is the scientific elucidation of this moment?” and the answer is always “Can you be more specific? “ “Can you tell me which element is to be examined?” “To what standard of error?” “With what metric?” “By what model?” Etc. Etc. You castigate me from time to time because you seem to imagine that I do not want to account for scientific observation and advance. I do but in any conjuncture, I cannot, nor can you. However, to think that the “recognition of nonhumans” is fully facilitated in the existential instance is exactly, to me, to allow the paucity of thought to dominate the occasion of thinking and to devalue the specific material locale including the human relation – not as preeminent at all but also not as inconsequent – a real relation among relations. If we write ourselves out of our ontologies we misrepresent exactly the materiality of ontology’s occasion. Such “objective” modeling mistakes itself for the material situation in which it occurs and that is not an accurate form of “recognition.”

Ian, thanks for responding. It does my brain good to think about this. Also, I’m outside academia, which makes me a little unknown, so I should probably mention that I take Meillassoux’s view on correlationism: it’s eminently worth it to break the circle but not automatically accomplished by asserting the equal existence of objects.

Anyway, it occurs to me we might make some headway into an OOE if we define ethics by its root word of ethos, or home. Not following Heidegger into his foggier climes, but by investigating the homing activities of objects. A beaver makes his dam and his hut, and that tells us something about his ethics. I had to remove two wasp’s nests that were being constructed in a doorway this weekend. Where I left a piece of the nest attached, the wasps came right back and started building again. Where I got the stump off clean, they went away. Spot reading: The ethics of the wasp requires some rubble of the past in order to continue as before.

In fact, I think we can make a case that human ethics are actually derived from the activities of other objects, because our sense of home is generally so unstable that we have to borrow it from others. Ethics as we think of it could be mostly an object-oriented ethics, and the burden would be to demonstrate the existence of a human ethics that is not mimetic of non-human objects.

And also: the home of the shark is the sea. If you have small children, do not let them go into waters where sharks are likely to be! That’s an ethical response that includes the ethics of the shark. (speaking as a father of two young boys…)

I think part of Jairus’ first comment bears looking at in greater depth. He said:

“Just to clarify, is the position against OOE of the opinion that a well grounded humanist ethics DOES stop shark attacks? I have only interacted with a few sharks but my general experience is that admonishing the immorality of their eating habits is about as effective as telling hipsters Ipads are made by slaves.”

I think the usefulness of OOO for thinking ethics, which is closely related to much of the work you’ve been doing here Levi, is that it helps us to better think the *ontology* and *materiality* of ethical concepts. They are philosophical objects, and the question we should be asking of philosophical concepts, like all objects, is “what do they do?”

A related question – what kind of ethical concepts do we wish to produce? Gestures, affects, or rules? or something else? Presumably, each of these are types of objects that have strenghts and drawbacks, that enter into relations with other objects in various ways, are more or less effective in *accomplishing* what their content is, lend themselves to being used differently by different beings, etc.

The discussion a bit earlier about the drawbacks of rules and judgement highlights this in terms Levi has used before: conceptual personae. This draws attention to the ways that one of the things that ethical concepts do, as objects, is produce other objects. One of the objects they produce are ethical subjects, which we could think of as the objects which use ethical objects in this or that way.

Thus, I think that all of the work you and others have done talking about the materiality of political concepts, of ideas, philosophical positions, and knowledge – as objects – is incredibly relevant to this discussion. How do we spread this or that ethical concept, how do can we render it compelling and relevant to larger swathes of beings? I think this approach gets at the heart of pne of the central questions for me, and others concerned with ethics, which is “why do we regularly fail to live up to what we believe is ethical?” Scu had a great post on this a few months ago: http://criticalanimal.blogspot.com/2011/11/some-thoughts-on-ethics-and-affect.html.

This post also linked to a post by Levi about affect, which briefly mentioned the Stoics and Epicureans. To shift the terms of the discussion slightly, I think Foucault’s later work examining these thinkers in terms of “care of the self,” especially in “The Hermeneutics of the Subject,” is incredibly relevant to many of the dilemmas people have raised here, and closely aligned with the point highlighted above about attending to what ethical concepts *do.*

First, I think care of the self, concern with one’s self, provides a satisfactory way of thinking through “enlightened self-interest.” One of the central points is that to care for others one must care for the self, as the self is that which would be caring for others. This requires work on the self, practices of the self, and techniques of the self for making one into the ethical subject one wants to be. Thus, care for the self is not self-absorption or narcissism, and historically has been practiced in accordance with rather austere moralities (the stoics and epicureans are examples). Being a vegetarian out of concern with one’s self as an ethical subject is a contemporary example of this. Additionally, what “the self” is is an open question (much as what the “human” is has been, and continues to be). Understanding the self as relational (or ecological) points towards the ways that care for the self can motivate care for non-humans.

Second, one of the major differences between care of the self and much of contemporary ethics (deontology, consequentialism, whatever), is that it is more concerned with living an ethical life than conducting ethical acts. Levi cares for his self; part of what defines his self is being a father; as a father, he should be concerned with the nurturing and protection of his daughter, whom he loves. The ethical nature of the act of stopping the shark from eating his daughter should not be separated from the broader question of the life Levi is living, and the type of subject he is. This does not excuse ethical acts associated with a type of subjectivity, or say that “is” justifies “ought,” but precisely the opposite – whether one should make oneself this or that type of subject is an open question (presumably, we as humans think being a father is a reasonable, if not desireable, choice). For instance, “Batman Begins,” seems to suggest that you cannot care for yourself if you are an executioner (in the broad sense of that term).

Third, that the subject knows that this or that is ethical is not enough – Foucault’s genealogy of care of the self showed how access to the truth in Greco-Roman antiquity, until the Cartesian moment, was typically accompanied by and realized through a transformation of the subject, rather than the mere acquisition of knowledge. Knowing or believing that this or that is ethical does not *do* very much if one does not *practice* it. This calls attention to a particular ontology of the ethical which is largely compatible with OOO – of concepts as “equipment” which ready and assist one for the circumstance one will encounter throughout one’s life, and of the site of ethics in “practice,” or more simply, what objects do. Care for the self as ethical practice means attending to what one does, and continually working on changing and bettering these practices through the creation and use of various forms of ethical equipment. Think ethics in this way points towards the important work ahead of us, in terms of grappling with the questions of materiality raised above.

Another thought: human ethical concepts don’t mean much for sharks. Operational closure makes the translatability and relevance of ethical *beliefs* (moreso than ethical practices) between species limited. Given that our interaction with other species is much less linguistic than it is with other humans, thinking about how to move away from a belief/rule formulation of ethics to other formulations seems central to ethical interaction with non-humans. The domestication of dogs or cats is an interesting example of cross-species ethical interaction that points towards how we have extended and enmeshed our conatus with some species’ more generously than we have with others’.

[…] of flat ethics. Over at Misanthropology, Craig has a pretty harsh rejoinder to my initial post on flat ethics. I find myself in a pretty interesting position, striving to respond to the humanists who are […]

this all very intriguing but.. isn’t thinking and speculating about objects, their relations and affects on other objects, including ourselves, is always done from our human, all too human perspective? i agree that every ontology&ethics needs to take into account non-human objects but they all suffer from the same problem: we cannot think beyond human thinking. so every OOO and especially OOO ethics will always suffer from some sort of anthropocentrism. how does OOO can answer this skepticism?